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The paradoxes that sit at the very core of physics

4 pointsby subnaughtover 9 years ago

1 comment

dmfdmfover 9 years ago
While the author postures as an advocate of science she is in fact aiding and abetting the rejection of the Western (scientific) World View and ironically using modern science to do so. You cannot just dispense with the (Aristotelian) principle of non-contradiction and then continue to pretend to do science and learn to live with contradictions.<p>This has been the state of modern physics since the development of quantum mechanics. During the Copenhagen debates about the &quot;meaning&quot; of QM, Bohr said that all the different interpretations of QM are just various choices on where to hide the contradictions. At the time ignoring these contradictions and telling physicists and students to &quot;shut up and calculate&quot; was not an unreasonable thing to do. There was a lot of work to do with respect to understanding and applying the new theory and the hope was it would lead to clues to resolve the questions. Fast forward a few decades and it became clear that whatever the source of the contradictions in QM, identifying it would not be simple and would probably require a new genius on par with Einstein.<p>So this approach has run its course and now a new approach is needed but her thesis is to reject science and just accept contradiction and paradox, i.e. the current state of modern physics. She claims that modern science is &quot;neurotic&quot; because of its commitment to non-contradiction and that non-scientific &quot;narratives&quot; and world views that accept (or even wallow in) contradiction and paradox are the answer to the conundrums in modern physics. This would the end of science.<p>In any case, the article does indicate the contradictions arise not from the metaphysical but from the epistemology of modern science. What she calls systems, language, categories, etc. are euphemisms for reason and, more specifically, our concepts (i.e. classes based on abstraction). Instead of discarding the principle of non-contradiction we need to apply it to our own method of reason, to our perception and conceptual methods and bring a non-contradictory and clearly defined observer into the realm of physics. This is an issue for philosophy and more specifically, epistemology.